A is for Agony
by Zubeneschamali
Summary: Missing scene from The Janus List. Charlie tells Don the contents of the list.


Title: A is for Agony

Author: Zubeneschamali

Rating: PG

Summary: Missing scene from "The Janus List." Charlie tells Don the contents of the list.

Author's Note: Looks like I'm not the only one whose muse got a kick in the butt from watching "The Janus List." Thanks to ritt for beta reading and for the penguin.

ooooooooooooooooooooooo

"United States FBI agent Colby Granger, also by the Chinese."

As the words on the voicemail recording sank in, Charlie felt his legs giving way underneath him, and the hand that was resting on the tabletop started to tremble. With an effort, he flattened his hand on the table and leaned on it, willing himself to stay upright. Looking at Amita, her face blank and white with shock, he could hear his earlier words to Don, seemingly still reverberating in the room: "Is that what my face looks like when I--"

Of course, he had no way of knowing what his face looked like when he discovered that someone he respected, someone whose respect he thought he had earned, turned out to be a traitor to his country. Someone who was on his brother's team—and someone who might be lying in wait for him at the safe house.

Charlie snatched his cell phone and flipped it open, stabbing the first button, his eyes locked on Amita's. On the desk phone, Ashby's calm voice was still dispassionately reciting a list of names and nationalities, a seemingly random mixture of places and people from around the world. He knew there would be a pattern to it, that given enough data and enough computing power, he could put together the pieces and figure out why. Why these people would turn on their homelands, why they would risk everything they held dear for something as simple and stupid as money. Mining the data on their careers, their bank accounts, their family lives, he could put together an equation that would explain why and how, if only after the fact.

Then his gaze caught the photo of the bridge that had been slapped up on the whiteboard earlier, the bright orange packages of the explosives forming a pattern that for once, only Don had been able to see. He remembered how after the adrenaline rush on the bridge and before chugging the Pepto Bismol, he'd caught a glimpse of the police video of Colby hanging underneath the bridge, risking his life with David to get the make of the cell phones so they could shut down what had appeared to be a mad bomber. He'd had no idea at the time what the two FBI agents were doing, but when the realization had hit him of how much they were placing their lives in his hands…he'd needed his pink "smoothie" pretty badly at that point.

And now Colby was going to be just another entry in a matrix of intelligence information and cash transactions, his life and his life choices modeled in a neat equation that Charlie would be asked to create for Don and what was left of his team in order to explain what Taylor Ashby's voice had shattered his world with only a few seconds ago.

"Charlie? Charlie, is that you?"

Don's voice cut through his thoughts and brought him back to the present. A wave of nausea rolled through him, and he swayed a little again, staring at the now-silent desk phone. No, he was wrong, he abruptly realized. No equation he could conceive of could possibly explain what he was about to say to his brother.

"Don, we, um…" His voice cracked, something that hadn't happened in at least a decade. "Where are you?"

"I'm about a mile away from their location, so whatever it is you have to say, you'd better hurry it up."

In the background, Charlie could faintly hear the sound of the siren on top of Don's SUV, and he pictured the vehicle hurtling through the nighttime streets, on its way to who knew what at the safehouse. Did Colby even know he was on the Janus List? Had he been assigned to watch the witness, or had he volunteered?

Megan. The thought hit him, and he had to grab at the table again. What if—

"Charlie, are you there?"

He took a deep breath and steeled himself, and then it all came out in a rush. "Don, we found the Janus List. Ashby hid it in Naomi's voice mail using the musical scale you discovered as the password. It lists about a dozen agents from various countries, including the countries that…that compromised them. It includes Dwayne Carter."

"And?" Don's voice was grim, as if he knew what was coming.

He looked up at Amita, who had reached over to grip his hand, her warm eyes lending him the strength he needed to get out the hardest words he'd ever had to say to his brother. "And Colby."

There was a long pause. Then came a string of expletives that under any other circumstance would have caused Charlie's eyebrows to raise, followed by a threat to tell their father. On this occasion, he felt like he could have matched Don's obscenities and raised him a few. "You're sure?" came the question that he knew his brother had to ask, if only to make it official.

For answer, he pressed the redial button, re-entered the passcode, and held his cell up to the speakerphone. After the recitation of the fifth name, he brought the cell back up to his lips. "Did you hear that?" he asked shakily.

"Yeah, I damn well heard that." He'd never heard that tone from his brother before, and the cold anger sent a chill down his spine. "I gotta go, Charlie. Take down the other names and hold on to them till I get back, okay?"

Charlie opened his mouth, about to ask if it wouldn't be better to hand them over to the agent on duty. Then he realized that Colby's name might not be the only one within the FBI. "Okay, Don. Just…just be careful, okay?" He got a terse acknowledgment before the call disconnected.

Folding his phone shut, he looked at Amita, who was staring back at him with a bleak expression on her face. "What do we do now?" she asked softly.

He realized with a start that his heart was hammering, pounding in a way it hadn't been even when he'd been pushing Ashby's gurney through the hospital tunnels, two steps ahead of an assassin. Why now, when it was over?

Because it wasn't over, he realized. It was just beginning. He looked through the glass at the FBI bullpen, at the few agents left this late at night, picturing the strong team that his brother had built crumbling apart like a sandcastle in the waves. Could he apply his data mining algorithms to extract the truth from the records of his colleague? Could he offer suggestions on how to interrogate his friend? Could he provide strategies on how to bargain increased information for a lighter sentence, for a reprieve from death for the man who had saved his brother's life on more than one occasion?

His stomach twisted, and he suddenly found himself kneeling over the garbage can, emptying out the slices of pizza he'd nibbled on for dinner. Then Amita was next to him, rubbing his back and making soothing noises, and he let the sound of her voice calm him, ground him, bring him back from the edge of despair that he'd just tumbled across.

Then he took a deep, shuddering breath and quietly said, "I don't think I can do this anymore."


End file.
